The first couple of weeks

I've been without internet at home or work for a few weeks and my usual watering hole, The Elbow Room, has ALSO been without it's usual WiFi. So instead of daily updates or getting this blog started at all, it's been delayed.

The first couple of weeks of DART travel have been an eye opening experience. I'm going to do several posts of different topics, I'd like to keep these individual posts as short as possible.

Let's first start with planning a trip anywhere. DART does have a website where they offer trip planning. They also have a mobile site. The main website is good if you know the bus or train you want to take. Otherwise, I'd advice against using the trip planner (on either site). To give you an example, I needed to take a bus from near Abrahms and Walnut Hill to the Red Line train. The trip advisor had me taking 3 different buses, totaling almost 2 hours of transportation. To start with it had me grabbing a bus in the complete opposite direction of my travel.

The mobile site is even worse. When planning a route on my phone last night, it's first suggestion was that I walk to Love Field from my apartment, which is SEVERAL miles away. There's a bus that stops IN FRONT of my apartment many many many times a day and goes DIRECTLY to Love Field. Maybe it knows I'm trying to lose weight, but that seems excessive.

The best thing to do, if you need to handle a new route, is to call DART directly at 214-979-1111. They're not open outside of "standard business hours" so even that's not perfect.

Today, while taking #39 to a location I hadn't been before, I asked the driver if he went by Inwood and Lemmon (the place where I'm typing this now at a Starbucks) and he said "yes". He then drove me up to the airport and said "I don't go anywhere near Lemmon"...so I walked about 2 miles to get back here. Nice.

I did speak with a DART IT person one day at a rail station and there is supposed to be a big revamp of the online system soon, but it doesn't work today.